1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 1. Frank Sinatra – In The Wee Small Hours (1955)

Dr Simon Reads... Listens... to the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. 


Here’s a new concept. Inspired by the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (compiled by Robert Dimery) I intend to do just that. Since an album is usually around about an hour at most, and I can listen to them while doing something else, and I suspect the majority of them will be on Spotify, hopefully I will be able to do them before I die. Even at the rate of 1 a day, that’s three years. 

1. Frank Sinatra – In The Wee Small Hours (1955). 

Now, I don’t have context for why Dimery chose these albums, I’m taking them from a raw list, but hopefully with a little help from Dr. Google I can get some context.  

This was Sinatra’s ninth studio album, and a mellow affair it is. All about failed relationships and lost loves; apparently he’d been going through a break-up with Ava Gardner at around this time which must have informed the mood. At times so laid-back as to be horizontal, the songs on this are very sparsely arranged, the backing musicians at times merely providing musical punctuation to Sinatra’s vocal stylings. Which, I have to confess, I found a little bland in this case since the songs are all so similar that they blend into one. However, one thing about Sinatra is that he makes this kind of mellifluous singing sound so darn easy that it’s you sometimes don’t realise it’s actually very accomplished. 

We all know some Sinatra songs, even if only My Way, Come Fly With Me, or New York, New York. None of that on this album. Probably the stand-out track for me is the version of Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo, pretty much an encapsulation of what the album is about. If it hadn’t been painted 13 years earlier, this is what the inhabitants of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks would be listening to. Fedora aslant, cigarette in hand, wandering lonely streets under a flickering streetlight, that’s how you listen to this album. 

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